I was in tears now, sobbing harshly, bucking. “Please! Please don’t…”
“Shh. Every boy wants this. No one is here to see. Every boy wants to go back to the womb.” Mother undulated her body on me, then bent forward low so that her small breasts hung down to point in my face, so white, the dark nipples just barely brushing my skin. One of them trailed through a tear. “Take it, Jack.” I blubbered and shook my head. “You want it. Taste it.”
I barked a loud sob. Even as I lifted my head again to suck the nipple into my mouth. And then I was licking it, sucking as much of the breast into my mouth as I could, tears coursing down my face and neck, lightly chewing on the tough nipple, switching hungrily to the other one and wanting to draw the whole breast into my mouth I was so ravenous and wishing I had my hands free and unexpectedly I came, arching my back, grunting loudly. She was hot inside and my sperm was hotter. I felt it shoot deep, as if falling away into another, infinite dimension hidden inside her. Then I fell back and only cried some more, turning my face away with eyes tightly shut. She would be gone when I opened them. She was only a dream.
But her voice sounded above me, as if to soothe my nightmares. “Shh, it’s all right. We have all night. We have as much time as you want with me.”
She leaned off me enough for me to slip wetly out of her, and I looked. She had taken a knife from the bedside table. Alarm flushed through me; it was some kind of buck knife, cruel-looking. But she unstraddled me and sat on the side of the bed to saw at the cord binding my feet to the door knob. It didn’t take much; the blade was so sharp. I watched the muscles shift slightly in her back as she worked, a beautiful white expanse of skin. There was a small brown mole on her back. A ghost with shifting muscles, a mole on its back. A wet vagina, and breasts that tasted of musky flesh…
Turning her head to smile at me over her shoulder, her hair in sexy disarray around her face, Mother said, “I didn’t mean to scare you this way, darling, but if I didn’t tie you up you would have run away before I could convince you to stay.”
She ran the flat of the blade over my thighs. I was careful not to move. “Next time you can tie
And I did.
* * *
For three days I called in sick at work. I think I told them I had a sinus infection.
We dragged the mattress off her bed and into the studio. We kept the shades down in the day. On the bare mattress we tangled like wrestlers, grinding the bones of our thin bodies together. I buried my face in the shadow of hair between her legs, so fervently that one might think I did indeed intend to crawl back into that place of my origin. I held her head down against my crotch, white-threaded black hair through my clenched fingers. She rode atop me and cried out in orgasm fiercely, digging claws into my breasts while jolts went through her entire frame. For a ghost, she definitely sweated. If she were only ectoplasm, then the reality of the entire universe was in question.
On the evening of our first day we lay together exhausted, not touching, chilly as the air cooled the sweat on our bodies. “How did you get here?” I asked her at last. Since the previous night, I hadn’t allowed myself to think clearly enough to vocalize anything other than gasps and groans.
“You wished me here. You rubbed the magic lamp, honey.”
“That ball. In the skull. I touched it…”
“It was your thoughts more than your touch.”
“So you’re an illusion the ball is making?”
“No. It remade me. It cloned me from what it could gather of me.”
God—I realized it. The dust. Skin cells…
“But what is it? Where’s it from?”
“I don’t know everything, but it’s a probe. It launched with a crew aboard it. They were just a few scraps of tissue that were to be automatically cloned when they reached their destination. Perhaps they were, and are out in the world somewhere. Perhaps they’re still trapped inside. But their computer resurrected me. It’s screwed up and thinks it’s doing its job. All this I know intuitively”
“And did you know this when you found it, or only since it remade you?”
“I’d seen it do this before, with someone else, seven years ago. Out West. Just from a hair between the pages of an old book. So I began to understand it then, and I know more now. But that’s all I know.”
“Why are you this age, though? Not fifty-five?”
My mother smiled, reached lazily to stroke my hair. “This is the age you best remember. You were ten. You thought I was beautiful. And you were looking at pictures of me the other day. You remembered me this way, very strongly. You brought me back. Your love. And your lust.”
“I never lusted for you.”
“Boys learn to love by lusting for their mothers; it’s the natural process.”
I sat up. “Bullshit. I missed you as my
I gazed around the studio. Our loyal audience of death’s heads, those empty-eyed voyeurs. The transformation of the skulls was continuing. All had antlers like branches, gnarled and spreading, a bare birch forest ringing us. Four sets of antlers had grown from the skull with the sphere, these arms reaching the ceiling and spreading to either side impossibly. The cow’s own eye sockets had filled up with bone, leaving only that black cyclopean orb.
Mother gently took my arm, pulled me back down beside her. And we barely left the room for the two days that followed.
On the morning of the fourth day I awoke to see that the branches of the skulls surrounding us had reached and fused with each other, created a jagged white nest around us. Or a barrier, trapping us together. Digits of bone had stabbed into the plaster of ceiling and walls. It was as though we were hidden in the heart of some coral reef. Swallowed in some great skeleton. Would the ring close in on us, until at last we truly were trapped? Until we were crushed, ground in those white fangs?
Mother slept. My stomach grumbled hungrily but I ignored it. Sitting cross-legged, I pulled toward me a stack of scrapbooks I had been meaning to page through. More of Mother’s art photographs.
In the last book I found a series of enlargements that stunned me. They were of Mother naked…but older, in her late forties I guessed. Gray hair. Ass widening and breasts sagging. She was bound and gagged in one shot, sodomized in another. Her male partner in these photos was a man about her age, gray- haired, tall and lean and…and with horror, I realized it was my grandfather. My grandfather, in his forties, having sex with his daughter, in her forties…
She had told me that she had seen the sphere at work before. Seven years ago, out West. Another ghost like her. Her father…as she best remembered him. As she had subconsciously called him back. And now I understood my grandfather. I understood my mother. Even as I felt sick, I pitied her. And I pitied myself, in turn.
But it didn’t stop me from doing to her what grandfather had done, when she awakened…
Mother straddled me again; she liked that control of movement. But she also liked submission; just before this, she’d had me tie her and spank her bottom until it glowed. She rocked atop me now, green eyes drugged in her intensity.
“You missed me, darling. You gave me life as I gave you life. We understand each other. We’re alike. No one else understands us. We need each other. Don’t ever leave me, darling, I missed you, I missed you, I love you, oh fuck me, darling, fuck me…”
Mother leaned her breasts down to dangle in my face. Thinking this was her intention, I sucked at them, but she sat back up and I saw the buck knife in her fist. And I realized she meant to use it.
“No!” I blurted, thinking she intended to kill me; that I might be resurrected and be all the more like her.
Mother plunged the knife down into her own side and cried out as if in orgasm. Blood spattered my belly, then began to flow hot down her body—down mine.
“Fuck me, darling, cut me, fuck me, please…”
“Oh God!”
She raised herself off my erection, took hold of it, and guided me into her incision. She bore her weight down and I slid inside easily amid the lubrication of blood. Her guts were hot in there.
She pushed the knife into my hand. I tried to hurl it away but she closed her fist around mine. She was
